Feel free to drop me a line if you’ll be there and want to connect. Below I’m including the outline and notes for my talk. I’ll likely submit the final paper to the MEA’s journal, Explorations in Media Ecology. More on that soon.

Media Ecology and Bios Theoretikos: Philosophy as Extended Cognition

– In this talk I draw on the work of Peter Sloterdijk to suggest that philosophical ability is closely tied to modes of training (askēsis) that aim to transform awareness through self-overcoming (metanoia). Specifically, I explore the media environments that facilitate philosophical activity and the practices that enable philosophical understanding.

– Philosophy on this view is facilitated by an intricate ecology of affordance spaces—academies, libraries, monasteries, and more—whose design helps train up the individual’s capacity to perform certain maneuvers in thought, maneuvers that make apparent the environments required for the bios theoretikos (the life of contemplation).

– To make this point, I start not with humans and our practices, but with spiders and theirs. As I will show in my talk, when we think of philosophy as an instance of extended cognition, we can draw many parallels between our practices and those of nonhuman species, who like us build artifacts to deepen their perception and understanding.Continue reading

Andy Clark’s work in the philosophy of mind has long had a strong influence on my thinking. I’ll have a bit to say about how his extended mind thesis figures into philosophical practice in my upcoming talk for the Media Ecology Assocation, but in this post I want to explore his work on predictive processing and perception, as he’s converging on similar conclusions to my own about the nature of perception, understanding, imagination, and action—namely, that they all arrive together in the co-construction of experience.

His tools and models for making this claim are different from my own, and so what most interests me in this context is how his (more advanced) resources—including a computational theory of the brain, coupled with extended and embodied notions of cognition, hierarchical predictive processing models, and Bayesian accounts of inference—match up with what I’ll shorthand as the transcendental–phenomenological resources of philosophy that I’ve been using in my recent posts. Clark is not strictly speaking a cognitive scientist, but he’s definitely closer to the “neuro” in “neurophenomenology” than I am. What’s at stake for me here is the following question, How accurate and useful are these transcendental–phenomenological resources in the face of cognitive science?